* See title above.

Its time I got back to half-assing a blog, not because anyone will read or has read this junk, but because I want to start a log of my journey into the “challenge” that I see come across my screen from time to time. No I will not be getting my self in shape or making some other life altering change, I will be doing something way less interesting and productive. Starting on the release of Mario Maker in North America, I set out a goal for myself, make and publish a new level everyday for a year.

I am happy to say it is day six and I haven’t given up yet! If anything every time I jump online and see the comments people have let it gives me joy!

So if you happened by from googling Mario Maker all you will find here is my log of levels with level codes to the current ones that are online.

As of now I do not have a capture card so I will have to figure out a way of taking pictures of the lever and video. If I can come by a cheap one hopefully I will be able to get caps rather then the crappy video/pictures from a cellphone that will be here for the moment.

Anyway feel free to comment with any ideas on levels and I would be more than happy to try and work them into a future level!

Well that’s it, you’ve finally won. I shall not buy another game that promotes or uses DLC as a gimmick to pander to the investors that seem to be taking over the gaming world.

In the past few years the rise of DLC and micro-trasactions have seeming gone uncheck. From extending the life of games on console by selling you a few new levels to the current norm or selling you content that has been blatantly ripped from the game so that the publishers can sell you some more ‘content’ down the road and show inverters and industry insiders that yes your game still has players and there still grinding the rat race because your games the ‘best’. Its not the fact that the gamer has only stayed to try and get a little glimpse at what the game might have been if it where release without DLC but release as a whole complete package, or the fact that you have patched out methods of speeding up the grind of your game. No no no, it has to be that your game and your DLC is the best, it has to…

Well guess what Devs and Publishers, this is bullshit!

I can’t be the only one around that feels shit on when I see DLC selling for the same fucking price or more than the base game. Example Evolve, yeah yeah yeah I know low handing fruit but its 1:30am and I can’t think so fuck you…

Evolve as a whole was super fun to play. Tight controls, fast paced game play, and very polished graphics, but 60$ for the game plus another 20$ for a season pass? Ok so if I get this season pass I main items from the upcoming DLC waves right? Such as playable charaters and maps, yes? No?! Well fuck me…. another 25$ season pass, well fuck that can’t be the norm right? Nope here comes Bungie, with the 20$ season pass for a few poorly strung together story missions and then another 40 fucking dollars for the next DLC drop!?

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!!!!!

I give you 80$, 20$ of which got me shit, and now your trying to sell me a 40$ dlc drop that you say has more content than the first 2 dlc drops combined? No way you mean it has like 4 levels and maybe a little story worked in, if its not a hassle of course…. Well FUCK YOU BUNGIE! I’m keeping my money this time. You can keep your fucking Destiny game and your Halo fan boy’s, cause im calling your bluff, I would have to guess this DLC drop will bring no more than 5 story missions with fuck all being added to the story and a raid, a raid in which you can not do match making because you know, its not like the consoles the game sells for don’t come with a mic or something…. Or the fact some people don’t liek trolling LFG’s or reddit to try and find a group to play with….

Fuck it next game that does this 60$ in DLC bullshit I’m selling what ever console I have for 50$ and buying myself a PlayBoy and some Vaseline. Then I can at least have something nice to look at and not have to take it in the ass raw.

The latest line in reboots from Director Johnathan Liebesman and Produced in part by Michel Bay does not disappoint, from the over the top CGI special effects, fight scenes and lighting effects, to the use of female leads as nothing more than sex objects; This reboot of TMNT has all the ear marks of another beloved franchise that has now been shit on by Michel Bay.

Going into this movie its fair to say I am more than a bit bias having grown up in the hay-day of the TMNT in the 1980’s. From the comics, 1980’s TV show to the action figures, my early childhood was dominated by the turtle crazy, hell I even got a turtle green cast when I broke my wrist. With that being said I will also say I am normally not one to chastise a director his/her past works, I try and take each film in on its own, as in Transformers and the Star Trek reboots both which I thought where fun action movies and the directing style worked well with the tone and writing of the movies, but at the same time in the case of Star Trek it felt that the essence of the series had been lost, the movie could have easily done well labeled as a new space sci-fi franchise.

Enough bitching about Michel Bay’s directing style and influence of shitting on things, its time to get to the review of the 2014 reboot of Teenage Mutant Turtles.

____________________________________________________________________

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

Fuck it, I was trying to think of a way to make this a well formatted, well informed, informational review but after wasting two hours of my watching this pile of shit fuck it. From the shitty voice acting to the Turtles that now look like the inbred love children of Shrek this movie gives the older TMNT fan nothing but a new found hate for reboots. The movie starts by building the character and back stories of April O’Neil and Vernon Fenwick (Aprils camera guy), making April into a try hard reporter that has no one taking her serious and Vernon into the ultimate perv co-worker spending more time hitting on April then doing his job. This shit show of intolerable back story bullshit goes on for at least the first 30 minutes of the movie while slowly introducing the turtles, The Foot Clan, Shredder, and Eric Sacks as Shredders apprentice, while making every good guy and bad guy into the ultimate stereo type of their role. From here the movie heads downhill as a fairly swift pace while gathering speed heading uncontrollably towards the deepest depths of movie hell.

After this fun into period of shitty dialog and bad acting we are finally given when we came for, Turtles! The turtles and April first cross paths after the turtles foil the clearly half-asses trap setup by The Foot Clan. Come on what the fuck! The Foot Clan in an elite group of murderers and hired hit-men, and they can’t figure a way to catch four turtles?!!? Oh wait, that’s because for some unknown fucking reason the Turtles now have super human strength, are bullet proof and other powers normally reserved for the like of Superman…. Who the fuck wrote this shit…. Have they EVER read a TMNT comic or seen one of the past movies or TV shows?!? Really you deserve to eat a bag of dicks for this bullshit. Why not give them x-ray vision and the power of flight? But back to the into of the Turtles and April. They meet on a roof top with some shitty dialog, April faints ect ect ect bullshit…….

Fuck this movie made me mad.

So from here some more shitty story is drawn out about how the Turtle are now from a lab experiment and where one Aprils pets and that Aprils father made the ooze. Really who the fuck do the writers think they are?!?!?! Rewriting a beloved story to some half-assed plot that only serves to make April into a mother character instead of the cool friend role she is known for… Does every movie that comes out have to be changed to fit the formula of the broken family gets reunited, the female lead is only there as a sex symbol and the supporting character is the friend0zone friend that does not realize they are that friend… Fuck this is getting old, it really feels like the groups of writers for major movies have no incentive to create new plots or change the norm…

Anyway from there the normal action movie script kicks in, some of the hero’s get captured, the other hero has to free the captured hero ect ect ect… It really is a shitty plot that has been told a thousand times before. So if you have seen any action or hero movie in the last oh say 50 years you know the story. With the exception of some really fucked up and inaccurate back story sections the movie past 3o minutes is nothing more than a CGI action movie, a shitty one at that. What the fuck is up with all the cuts and camera angles. Does ever action scene have to be filmed from a upward angle while spinning around the character? I normally have no issue with movies and things like motion sickness but this one almost made to puke. I’m sure if I saw in 3D I would either vomit or have a major headache from the shitty camera movement…

Oh and who ever did the casting for Voice actors I hope you never work again! I love Jonny Knocksville but it was the wrong person to cast… Also fuck off to who ever wrote the dialog for the Turtles. Donatello is not some wimpy nerd you fucktard….. Fuck….

So I feel that I have bitched enough at the moment so I’ll sum this up for those looking for a short answer.

The TMNT 2014 reboot is a bad movie. From the poor directing to over use of CGI it has little to no redeeming factors and shits on the franchise for two hours. If you loved or even liked TMNT comics, the 1980’s TV show or ever the 1990’s movies save you money and time.

So I got the try Watch_Dogs for the PC today and I must say, its one of the worst ports to PC I have seen in a very long time. It reminds me of the early 2000’s when trying to get a good port of a console game on the PC or vice versa was like trying to find a clean hooker in Las Vegas. You know deep down that in some magical land they must be real, they have to be, but you know better, its going to end up the same way as before. You’re going to be out 50$ and feel like you can’t get the stank off, even with bleach. That’s what Watch_Dogs for the PC is, that stank you can’t get off from a cheap hooker.

Now I know what some people are going to say, oh the games not bad its just uPlay is crap. I agree uPlay is crap, in my eyes its the next “Games for Windows” a half assed attempt at digital distribution that harms the games that use it more than it helps them. But I’m not ranting today about uPlay, I can say first hand that Watch_Dogs is jacked when without uPlay fucking up the works. So I will get back to basing this pile of shit attempt at a port. The game was installed via Steam on the machine I used so I got the privilege of getting pissed at uPlay. So I decided that the darker side of the internet might hold my solution. A crack for the game that removes the DRM and uPlay requirements. So I jumped on ye’ old internet answering machine google and found what I needed. I applied the crack as recommended and was happy to not have to slam my head into a wall until uPlay decided it was time to work. The game booted up and loaded find. I won’t go into too much detail as just googling Watch_Dogs for the PC will result in many tails of what I went though.

So to dispel this whole Ubisoft hates only ATI/AMD thing I was running this on a machine that has a i5 and a GTX 750 Ti, and still had crashes, poor frame rates, and all the other fun bugs that made it feel like I was playing a public Alpha of a game and not a major retail release. I move to change this saying to Ubisoft hates ALL PC gamers. It feels like they would rather try and sell only to console gamers that have the attention span of a fly and are willing to buy every version of what ever shitty series they are crapping out that month, than to a PC gamer that expects a polished product with community support and a decent shelf life of more than 3 months.

Again I’m getting distracted from my point I was trying to make. Simply put Watch_Dogs for the PC is not just a failure due to uPlay sucking some large donkey balls but a shit port that should be sent to the New Mexico desert to become a myth like E.T. for the Atari.

Oh and here is a shitty remake of that the cover should be for Watch_Dogs for the PC.

So after a bunch of time getting random crap information on the internet about how to get controller support back I finally got it to work. The solution is simple with a dash of stupid due to the broken nature of the game.

Step One:

Install the game and run it at least once. You will need to do this as the game makes a config file with all the setting, this is what we are going to need to modify to add support back in. The config file is called “config.cfg” and located in the following folder “…\Steam\SteamApps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo\cfg\”

At this point I highly recommend backing up the default config.cfg file as well as the controller.360.cfg file just in case something goes wrong. Simple copy the two files into a new folder.

Step Two:

Open the config file with Notepad ++ this is a free open source notepad that works MUCH better than Windows Notepad. Its open source so if you like it please donate to keep this amazing program going! No I don’t get paid to back them I just love there program and have used it for about 10 years.

This will bind the up button press on the D-Pad to run the config file that’s needed to enable controller support.

Step Four:

Save and exit the config file.

Step Five:

Load the game up join a match and hit Up on the D-Pad this should re-enable controller support for the analog sticks. If it worked your set, kind of. Since the game is a bit broken you will have to hit Up on the D-pad to enable the controller again when you switch to a new server/game.

:Note:

When ever you hit the Up it is running the controller.360.cfg this means if you have tweeked your sensitivity or button layout it will be changed to what ever it is set to in controller.360.cfg

So the next set is to get your controller where you like it for button layout and sensitivity. You can do this in game and I would recommend doing it in a local offline bot match. Once you have your controller set how you like it make a note BEFORE closing out of the game on sensitivity, and button layout. We will then use this info and change the controller.360.cfg so that when you hit the Up on the D-pad it will load everything to how you like.

:Note:

For some unknown reason I sometimes have to hit Up on the D-pad twice when starting a new game for the config to load all the settings correctly.

You can find the controller.360.cfg at in the same config folder as config.cfg “…\Steam\SteamApps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo\cfg\”

Once again open it up with Notepad++

The top of the file has the binding for attacking and actions, you can change them as you see fit if the defaults are not to your liking.

Example:

Default

// Key bindings
bind “A_BUTTON” “+jump”
bind “B_BUTTON” “+reload”

If you wanted A to reload and B to jump it would look like this. You can swap around actions as needed just make sure to copy them correctly or else they will not work.

// Key bindings
bind “A_BUTTON” “+reload”
bind “B_BUTTON” “+jump”

About halfway down you will find the location for setting your sensitivity.

Horizontal sensitivity is listed in the config as “joy_yawsensitivity”

Vertical sensitivity is listed in the config as “joy_pitchsensitivity”

So I have been getting back into the habit of driving around to a new place several times a week. I, like many, jump onto Google Maps to get an idea of where today’s adventure might lead. I tend to use the map in the default state as it gives me an idea of if the area will be desert and what the mountains might be like. Then once I have picked a rough idea of where I want to go I check the street view to see what’s there. I had yet to find anything interesting like most people, lots of cars, empty road and the occasional blurred face of a passer by. Today though, I stuck gold? I dropped the street view guy and was met with a stripped screen. You can check it out here, or at the link below.

Not sure where it might be other then corrupted pictures maybe but it made my day to find something other then the norm on Google Maps today 😀

For whatever reason I woke this morning a bit early and with nothing really planned for this time I jumped online to find that PAX East was happening this weekend and was about to start in a few hours! I was excited and once again consumed with the idea of conventions and the infinite potential they give the socially awkward, like myself, to find and come together with others that are like minded and just as socially inept. Had I somehow gotten my hands on tickets when they were on sale I would have been there, but nope once again they sold on in a matter of hours, which brings up the first of many little things I find wrong with the current convention scene and its apart lack of wanting to change to make it more accessible for those who have less free time, and less in their pocket books. So once I got over the boohoo poor me I can’t go again, I got to talking with a friend about the whole thing and it makes me feel like they want to keep some sort of nostalgic small indie convention feeling, while having it compete with the likes of Comic Con (San Diego), and E3. The problem with that is you can’t have you cake and eat it too without giving a little.

Let’s get some background information before I just rant and come off like a total ass that is just jaded from never being able to attend PAX.

My first PAX was PAX Prime in 2009. My buddy and I were looking for something to go to since it had been a while since we had gone to CES or other type of convention. I can’t recall who found PAX but it was stumbled on and seemed to be they type of venue that we would both enjoy. Have no clue about the history of PAX, Penny Arcade or the community I jumped into the forum and joined a few community events to get a feeling of who attended the convention and to give me some way of meeting people that had been before. I attended the Pre-PAX Crawl, met some of the nicest people I have ever met and had an amazing time helping with the PAX Prank, I knew from there this was something I wanted to do again. So for the next two years I went to Prime two more times and went to east twice. I can comfortably safe I’m not a noob to PAX or conventions. I have nothing but love for PAX but, and this is a Sir-Mix-A-Lot size big but here, PAX you’re going to have to change, with the ever increasing popularity of video games, the rise of the geek culture from the basement of your Mom’s basement to the front lines of modern cult and society things that once where uncool to attend and like are now growing at exponential rates.

The idea that PAX wants to try and keep it as the convention for the gamer by the gamer is great and noble, but let’s be honest its grown too big for itself. This last year East sold out in a matter of an hour or so and Prime will likely do the same and once more crash the servers of the ticket sales client. The fact is that PAX needs to mature and change venues to some place that can handle the growth that’s happening. It’s great that the guys from Penny Arcade are keeping the show local but Seattle is not built of a convention of the size of PAX Prime now. As for East well Boston is a great location the convention area is lacking hotel space near the convention center, I’m sure if you have ever been to BCEC you will agree. If the city/industry builds up in the years to come around BCEC East will be fine, but Prime you’ve out grown you britches bro.

Ok so assume Prime gets moved, let’s talk about the positives and negatives.

– Negative –

Loss of local presents in Seattle

Loss of some of the nostalgic feels

Loss of access to some of the younger folks if moved to some states

Washington Convention Center as a very cool unique layout/feeling

– Positive –

Growth! – Changing the venue to some place like LA or Las Vegas would allow for exponential growth

Cheaper accommodation – Have a convention downtown in a large city makes staying close to the event cost, lots. Switching to say Las Vegas would allow for hotel costs to be halved if not more. Currently I priced 4 days for Prime at a close hotel and the bill was pushing 1500$. I booked a 4 day stay in Vegas for a convention AT the local for 500$ not to mention the layout of Vegas lends itself to big conventions.

More tickets – changing venues to a larger location would allow the ticket limites to be raised and allow for more convention goers. This would also allow for the potential of lowering ticket costs, making up for the cost in ticket sales.

Travel – Seattle wasn’t bad to travel to but Vegas being strictly a tourist area makes traveling there on the cheap a bit easier. Most airlines have deals on air fare.

The negatives might kill the “feeling” of PAX with a place like Las Vegas but at the same time there is no telling. I feel it would not kill the feeling but change it for the better in the long run. Yes you’re in a desert at the same time Vegas is still growing and plenty of conventions that happen there survive and thrive. The area has lots to offer and the fact that the costs imposed on convention goes has the potential to be affordable to the masses again is a huge upside. What’s the worst that might happen? PAX Las Vegas the one that was a one night stand. There is nothing to keep it there if it fails. I feel it stays where its at it will die, and it will not be a silent death.

No matter your view on the subject leave a commit lets at least talk about the possibility.